When a pigment is used in an inkjet recording ink as a colorant, use of an ordinary hydrocarbon surfactant makes it difficult to accomplish an equivalent level with a dye ink in homogeneity of a solid image portion and color developing of a color image. Therefore, it has already been known that use of a fluorochemical surfactant reduces surface tension of ink and enhances homogeneity in the solid image portion, being able to attain improvement in color developing.
However, some conventional fluorochemical surfactants give load to the environmental load although they can form high-quality images, others cannot form high-quality images although they do not give much load to the environment. There is a problem that reduction of environmental load and improvement of image quality are difficult to attain at the same time, and further, bubbles are difficult to disappear.
Under such circumstances, an inkjet recording ink containing a specific fluorochemical surfactant and a foam inhibitor has been proposed in order to perform formation of high-quality images on plain paper (refer to PTL 1).
Although this proposed technique enables reduction of environmental load brought by the fluorochemical surfactant, sufficient effects are not be obtained in terms of formation of high-quality images (high color developing property). At present, there is still difficulty in attaining reduction of environmental load and improvement in image quality at the same time.